Welcome to the Wiki Lab!

Lab Objective

Basic: Participate in an actual wiki.

Advanced: Create a wiki and customize it's front page with dynamic content from internal and external data sources  

The Big Idea Behind This Lab

"Wiki" is an evocative yet ambiguous word. As discussed in the lecture for this unit, "wiki" as a concept has several meanings. The basic objective addresses the primary information sharing and curating elements of a wiki. The advanced objective dives a little deeper into the mechanics of wiki-focused collaboration systems. In order to be able to utilize and recommend a wiki for strategic purposes, one should be familiar with all facets of a "wiki" and understand how the functionality of various wiki platforms determine their best-suited application.  

Basic Requirements

• Sign-up for a Wikipedia.org and/or Wikia.com account.
• Read the community/editing guidelines
• Familiarize yourself with the wiki code/markup language in the Sandbox
• For example, after registering an account on Wikipedia.org click on "Go to the Introduction and learn the basics about Wikipedia >>" to start learning about it.
• Read the Five Pillars of Wikipedia
• Add new information to an existing article (be sure to add a citation)
• Correct the spelling / grammar / formatting or otherwise clean-up an existing article
• Create your own article, following the guidelines of whichever site you use.

[Note: if you are already a Wikipedia.org contributor, or have performed the following activities and want an alternate assignment, please contact me.]

Advanced Requirements

• Create a wiki (or site with similar collaboration functionality) using a free service, or installing mediawiki (if you have your own server space -- it's okay to use favico or similar installer)
• On the homepage, have an area for each of the following:
  • A feed of bookmarks from a service like delicious.com stumbleupon, digg.com, etc.
  • A list of the latest edits and/or new pages (basically the recent changes to the wiki)
  • A list of the latest documents uploaded to the wiki
  • A welcome message with posting guidelines
  • A feed with photos from a service like Flickr.com or Picassa, and/or an embedded video.
• Configure access control so that different users have different privileges

[Note: Refer to the Avenue A | Razorfish wiki presentation in the advance materials for inspiration] 

Deliverables

• Links to the pages you added to, edited, and created
• Post a note in the discussion for this unit about your experience with this lab
• Post a reply to somebody else's experience with this lab (if you're the first post, congratulations, but you still need to post a reply at some point)
• Advanced: link to the wiki you created
• Advanced: describe the different access levels in place the privileges each possesses